Birthright In Other Primes

[BedLlama]

So I've recently decided to design (with the intention of eventually running, natch) an AD&D campaign. I've always wanted to incorporate kingdom building and management in to my games, but never really got around to following through on those ambitions until I stumbled on the Birthright boxed set in my closet a couple of weeks ago. Now, I've perused the contents of this boxed set a couple of times in the past, but just like all the campaign box sets I own, I mostly just poured over the fluff for things to pilfer for my own home brew setting. This time is barely an exception- rather than raid the setting for fluff, I'm now raiding it for crunch.

In time I hope to dump my campaign notes in to this thread. Until then, I would like to hear from people who have had experience using Birthright kingdom building and management for games set outside of Cerilia, both as a DM and as a player. Did anyone run in to any unforeseen consequences during this process? How were Bloodlines handled?

[AndrewTall]

Good luck!

The simplest way to handle bloodlines is simply to ignore them - the only mechanic effect on the domain rules tends to be with regards to the regency collection & maintenance cap. Otherwise blood powers tend to be purely adventure level so easy to set aside if inconvenient.

So one approach is simply to ignore the cap.

Or, you could set the cap at, say Leadership+Charisma mod * "x" to encourage certain domain sizes.

Or you could replace the divine source of bloodline with some equivalent (local gods, alien heritage, etc) and change the names of abilities/feats to suit and keep the concept of regency.

Etc.

Another (minor) issue you would have is in dividing up the map to get equally sized provinces, but as long as you are happy with bigger provinces being "Alahara east" and "Alahara west" in BR terms or some such descriptor, you should have no problem.

[arpig2]

I have been running Birthright games in my own homemade worlds ever since the game came out. In fact, I have never played in Cerilia - come to think of it I have never played any form of D&D in any published world.

Anyway, I had no trouble with the bloodlines at all, we use them completely unchanged except that we just discard the whole gotterdamurung Diesmar thing.

They are simply some sort of magical essence that runs in some people and not in others, sort of like the medieval idea that the bloodline of any king was somehow magical. I dumped the names of the old Gods and used simple A-G for out of character purposes, and for in-character purposes I just chose the most appropriate local deity to name their bloodline after. Therefore if an elf had an Anduiras bloodline I had them record it as Derivation A (Colleran), and his dwarf buddy would be Derivation A (Moradin) and so on.

The idea being that nobody actually knew where the powers came from and so attributed them to descent from various gods (sort of like how Julius Ceaser's clan claimed descent from Venus). The actual source of them has always been the magical nature of the land itself, using the same sort of quasi-sentient concept that is behind the idea of "Land's Choice". There is no cataclysmic event before which bloodlines did not exist, they have always existed.

This has worked just fine for 18 years.

I strongly recommend you take a look at the Green Knight's Ruins of Empire rules variant, it is a major improvement on the original.

[arpig2]

And as far as Andy's comment regarding the province sizes, well I never had a problem with that, it's my world so the map is whatever I want it to be, right?

[Thelandrin]

I really like the idea of Leadership * X as a bloodline variant.

If you wanted to genericise the bloodlines, you could always go with Bloodline of Fire (Basaia), Honour (Anduiras), Intrigue (Brenna), Magic (Vorynn), Nature (Reynir), Shadow (Azrai) and Water (Masela).

[BedLlama]

Thanks for the input folk!

Bloodlines, I've decided to handle in the simplest way- by keeping the mechanics more or less intact. Any time I plan a new campaign the setting gets little revisions to accommodate the direction I want to take things, so adding Bloodlines and powers isn't a really big deal. The fluff needs fiddling though, as my gods are aloof and far removed from mortal affairs. I'm thinking of reversing the source of power from standard Birthright fluff; rather than having a divine bloodline that makes you worthy of holding domains, the fact than one owns domains will instead grant the regent traits of divinity. Since my setting's gods draw power from the collective faith of mortals this actually fits in nicely, a great (or feared) leader could simply be tapping in to a portion of this zeitgeist.

I'm considering drafting up new Bloodlines for the setting, although for sanity's sake it will have to be a large list of Bloodlines with a narrow selection of powers, as opposed to Cerilia's small number of diverse Bloodlines. This could prove to be entirely too much work, though- we'll see. I'll also need to figure out how to integrate psionic characters in to the rules, and figure out how far to take to integration. Hash out some 'realm manifestations', perhaps? I don't suppose anybody knows if someone else has tried this? Psionicists aren't terribly common, but I don't want them to be any more rare than Magic-Users, either.

I also want to plug HexMapper. I stumbled across this tool the other day, and while the actual maps aren't too pretty, it does let me make a continent-sized hex map, and then zoom in up to 12 times on progressively smaller scales. The map I'm working on right now can be scaled from 1091 miles per hex, down to a tactical scale of 7 feet per hex. Which is pretty sweet.